The "Best Union Members": Class, Race, Culture, and Black Worker Militancy in Chicago's Stockyards during the 1930s

Immigration & Ethnic History Society
University of Illinois Press

The "Best Union Members’: Class, Race, Culture, and Black Worker Militancy in Chicago's
Stockyards during the 1930s

Author(s): Paul Street

Source: Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Fall, 2000), pp. 18-49

Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Immigration & Ethnic History
Society

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Accessed: 29-10-2015 21:48 UTC

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The “Best Union Members”:
Class, Race, Culture, and Black Worker
Militancy in Chicago’s Stockyards
during the 1930s

PAUL STREET

FEBRUARY 15, 1938, was a tense day at the Wilson & Company
meatpacking plant in Chicago’s South Side stockyards district. That
afternoon, eighty-seven workers in the Wilson’s sheep-killing “gang”
idled the plant’s entire sheep division for nearly an hour. Those workers
stepped down from their raised work platforms, leaving valuable sheep
carcasses spoiling and dangling from overhead conveyors, to protest the
discharge of veteran black worker Johnny Johnson, who had been fired
because blisters prevented him from tying lamb legs at the pace de-
manded by his foreman. The striking workers included both blacks and
whites. Given the predominantly black composition of the stockyards’
cattle-, hog-, and, especially, sheep-killing departments in the 1930s,
however, the strikers were mostly African Americans. Faced with dra-
matic, interracial resistance at a strategic beginning point in the
continuous-flow slaughtering, processing, and packing process, Wilson
took Johnson back on another job.!

The striking workers belonged to the recently formed Packinghouse
Workers’ Organizing Committee (PWOC), an especially aggressive and
idealistic affiliate of the militant new Congress of Industrial Organiza-
tions (CIO). The industrial-unionist CIO was formed in 1938 as rival to
the more conservative, cautious, and craft-oriented American Federation
of Labor (AFL). It was dedicated to the organization of all industrial
workers, regardless of skill and related distinctions of race, religion and
ethnicity.

The work stoppage at Wilson’s was just one among many examples
of black packinghouse workers’ early participation in the militant new
unionism of the CIO. When Harold Preece surveyed Chicago’s
meatpacking district for the black daily Chicago Defender in the fall of
1939, he found “colored members”—from the union’s Assistant Na-
tional Director “Hank” Johnson “down to the Negro shop-steward who

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Street 19

may preach at some storefront church on Sunday”—to be “the back-
bone” of the PWOC.? That same year, the University of Chicago’s
Oscar Hutton argued that black workers were “the backbone of many
CIO unions” in Chicago, especially the PWOC. He discovered that black
packinghouse workers “remain intensely loyal” to their CIO union even
after long periods of layoff from the meatpacking industry.4 One year
earlier, black sociologist Horace Cayton learned from a PWOC officer
that blacks had surpassed Polish Americans as “the best union mem-
bers” in the “Yards” largely Polish- and Lithuanian-American workforce.°
Consistent with that claim, blacks comprised a disproportionate share of
the union’s stewards, volunteer organizers and committee members and
the animal killing floors staffed primarily by African American males
were the early PWOC’s most militant and heavily organized work de-
partments in Chicago.® “Colored people has woke up to unionism now,”
one black packinghouse labor told Cayton: “he [the black worker] won’t
accept the boss-man’s telling him, ‘you don’t want to be with the white
man’. ... The average Negro makes a good union man.”’

The special black militancy was not limited, however, to males. In
1939, Chicago PWOC activist Anna Novack told Betty Burke of the
Federal Writers Project that “the Polish and Lithuanian girls” were “the
hardest to get in” the CIO packinghouse union. “The colored girls,” by
contrast, “come into the union easy, and at union meetings they now
stand up and have their say.” Novack’s claim was seconded more than
three decades later in an oral history interview with Sophie Kosciolowski,
an early CIO shop-steward at the Chicago Armour plant and the first
head of PWOC’s Women’s Organizing Committee. “The colored girls
were better,” Kosciolowski recalled, “easier to organize than the white
women.”®

Chicago’s stockyards provide an especially striking, though not the
only, anomaly for labor historian David Brody’s ill-advised 1985 judge-
ment that, for black workers, “the CIO cause seemed less a hopeful
event than a threat to their precarious place in American industry.”

This new black militancy marked a significant turn of fortune for
those engaged in the struggle to organize workers in the notorious in-
dustrial setting that Upton Sinclair dubbed “the Jungle.” Chicago pack-
inghouse union activists long had been frustrated by what they per-
ceived as black workers’ tendency not to join unions before the 1930s.
During national meatpacking strikes in 1904 and 1921-1922, Chicago
packinghouse unions had collapsed, thanks partly to the packers’ use of
black strikebreakers, who refused to join “the white man’s union.”’ Black

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20 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

workers, hired in part for their perceived company loyalty, attained a
permanent and significant presence in the packinghouses, particularly
on the strategic, all-important animal killing floors, where the packing
companies especially valued loyal, that is, non-union workers.!° The
black community’s reputation for siding with capital over labor within
and beyond the stockyards led a worker in the Armour plant’s employee
barbershop to interrupt activists discussing the CIO’s possibilities in the
1930s stockyards with the question, “what about the colored people,
who break strikes?”!!

How and why did these previously “company loyal” black workers
emerge as the stockyards’ “best,” most militant union members during
the 1930s? Historical scholarship on blacks and the CIO, which now
includes an expanding new literature focused on the meatpacking indus-
try and Chicago’s stockyards,!* finds a combination of forces that si-
multaneously pushed and pulled black industrial workers into the new
industrial unions of the 1930s. On the push side stood black workers’
troubled relationship with industrial employers, who betrayed the here-
tofore mostly non-union black community by designating blacks as the
“first fired and the last re-hired” during the Great Depression. At the
same time, employers’ conscious scattering of black workers throughout
workplace facilities during the 1920s produced a shared, interracial work-
place experience of exploitation, interdependence, and resistance for
black and white workers. As a result, union organizers were able to
build upon a new biracial solidarity developed on the shop-floor over
the course of the interwar period. In a classic case of ironic and unin-
tended consequences, employers’ racialization of their industrial rela-
tions provided conditions favorable for interracial unionization and black
militancy.

On the pull side, many CIO unions made special appeals to black
labor, putting the particular needs of black workers at the forefront of
their list of demands. CIO leaders and organizers knew that the indus-
trial model of union organization they championed required racially
inclusive unions, especially where blacks made up a significant portion
of the workforce. They were aware that leading industrial employers
had commonly used black workers to prevent or destroy unions and that
managers placed black workers in hot, filthy, backbreaking and other-
wise disagreeable tasks at the strategic front end of the modern indus-
trial work process (killing floors in meatpacking and iron foundries in
Detroit’s auto plants) where workers possessed their greatest capacity to
halt production and damage materials. They knew also that unions affili-

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Street 21

ated with the rival AFL owed part of their weakness in industry to black
workers’ perception of AFL unions as hostile and indifferent to black
needs and capacities. This knowledge was greatest among the CIO’s
significant and influential number of Communist and other leftist orga-
nizers, for whom belief in racial equality was a fundamental article of
faith as well as practical organizing necessity.

This commonsensical and largely workplace-based analysis!3 provides
no small part of the explanation for black union leadership in the Chi-
cago stockyards of the late 1930s. Chicago’s meatpacking industry pos-
sessed in relatively great degree each of the factors that historians rightly
deem crucial to CIO success with black workers: a significant, strategic,
and long-term black position in the workplace, the racial integration of
key work departments over the course of the interwar years, the betrayal
of outward black company allegiance through racially discriminatory
layoffs during the Great Depression, and a strong union commitment to
racial equality influenced by effective left-wing leadership.

But this crucial conjuncture of workplace and union factors, the dis-
covery of which lies at the heart of recent scholarship on race and class
in Chicago’s packinghouses,!* does not provide the entire explanation.
Two additional factors deserve more extended treatment than they have
so far received. The first of these is the all-or-nothing logic built into
African Americans’ distinctive triangular relationship with white em-
ployers and the white-dominated labor movement during the war and
interwar years. Hired by workplace masters who viewed them as an
inferior workforce valuable chiefly as a cheap, non-/anti-union reserve
black workers in “the Yards” enjoyed distinctly small space for choos-
ing sides during recurrent packinghouse labor conflicts. Since managers
were less tolerant of black resistance than protests by white workers and
were likely to fire large numbers of blacks in response to the perceived
union militancy of even a few African American workers, black workers
felt distinctly compelled to choose either united outward “company loy-
alty” or united militancy to secure victory for a strong union that would
protect their job rights against employer retaliation.

Second, there was an ethno-cultural dimension to black labor mili-
tancy in the interwar years. African American culture, community, and
consciousness positively informed and encouraged an especially mili-
tant and idealistic brand of black trade unionism in Chicago’s
Depression-era stockyards. Once they chose unionism, many black pack-
inghouse workers were more militant and effective as trade-unionists
partly because of what they brought on to the shop-floor and into the

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22 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

union hall from their distinctive and race-conscious culture and commu-
nity. The PWOC in Chicago awakened to, and connected with, elements
of black workers’ historical experience, culture, and consciousness that
provided special advantages to the CIO cause at the same time that
black workers woke up to the logic of industrial unionism.

The second part of this supplemental explanation builds on a recent
academic literature that has begun to challenge the once conventional
wisdom that African Americans’ culture and community inevitably ori-
ented black workers away from the labor movement. This scholarship
highlights black cultural and political attributes that positively informed
black worker resistance in the CIO era and discovers previously hidden
dynamics of black working-class culture. Thanks especially to the writ-
ings of Robin D.G. Kelley, it shows how trade unionism was one of
several interrelated weapons —including open organizational resistance
and more informal, “sub-political” tactics like feigning illness, employee
theft, slowdowns, and even sabotage—that black workers employed in a
many-sided struggle against racism.!>

This new literature on black worker resistance and CIO militancy has
focused mainly on the Jim Crow South, where timeworn structures of
legal segregation, black disenfranchisement, and open racial terrorism
make the multi-faceted cultural, political, and sub-political dimensions
of black labor experience obvious to historians. There has been little
effort to examine the distinctive cultural and political dimensions of
black CIO activism in the not-so racially “free” North, where more
subtle but nonetheless pervasive patterns of racial discrimination helped
ensure that the story of northern black labor was no less intertwined
with the development of African Americans’ racially distinctive cultural
and political experience and consciousness than in the South. As part of
a broader effort to show how African Americans’ unique ethnic experi-
ence contributed to the labor movement—the same is widely recognized
by historians when it comes to white workers of diverse European an-
cestry—this article seeks to redress some of that regional gap in the new
historiography of black labor while deepening our understanding of the
emergence of mass production unionism.

“STRIKE INSURANCE”: THE MAKING OF A
BLACK WORKFORCE

Between 1915 and 1918, Chicago’s packinghouse employers increased
their number of black workers from 1100 (less than 5 percent of the

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Street 23

total stockyards workforce) to more than 10,000 (roughly 20 percent).
Most members of this large new black workforce were recent arrivals
from the Deep South, participants in an historic black movement from
the farms and plantations of the ex-Slave states to the factories and
cities of the North. Laid-off in large numbers during the recession of
early 1921, black workers were re-hired en masse to break the national
meatpacking strike of 1921-1922, and for the rest of the 1920s they
made up roughly 30 percent of the “Yards’” workforce. '®

Claims by leading Chicago packinghouse employers of a special be-
nevolent concern for their new black workforce did not square with
numerous racist personnel practices in the stockyards during and after
World War I.'’ Even so, the “yards” nonetheless stood as relative is-
lands of opportunity and security in a local labor market sea of exclu-
sion and oppression. Many of Chicago’s industrial employers either
refused to hire any black laborers or employed only a token number.
Thus, the packers by 1920 employed more than half of the city’s black
industrial workers. !®

Most Chicago industrialists employed blacks exclusively in the low-
est paid, least secure, and most disagreeable jobs. The packers were
somewhat different. Black packinghouse workers were disproportion-
ately lumped in the stockyards’ dirtiest, wettest, and worst-paid jobs and
departments. They were effectively banned from certain favored and
publicly sensitive tasks and work rooms (particularly those where white
plant visitors on company-sponsored tours complained about “colored”
hands touching finished edible products). Few if any blacks worked in
the “auxiliary” packinghouse crafts (as carpenters, steam fitters, and
electricians, etc.) or as foremen. Still, blacks took an unusual number
and share of middling and prized semiskilled and even skilled “produc-
tion” jobs in the stockyards. They worked in knife positions on the
all-important killing and cutting floors, the historical centers of knife
skill, shop-floor militancy, and rank-and-file “workplace bargaining
power” in meatpacking.

These mostly unskilled, notoriously difficult, unpleasant, and exhaust-
ing work departments may have been as much as 90 percent black in the
1930s, according to one union estimate. There blacks entered the
industry’s “knife aristocracy,” working as cattle-splitters, “floormen,”
“rumpers,” “ham-facers,” and in other simultaneously rugged and delli-
cate jobs vital to the packers’ feverish pursuit of “uninterrupted produc-
tion.” By 1930, Chicago’s packinghouses employed roughly 2000 black
butchers, making the stockyards a leading provider of relatively

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24 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

good-paying industrial jobs for black Chicagoans. Alongside their con-
siderable, even disproportionate presence in the anti-union “employee
representation plans” (“company unions” formed during and immedi-
ately after World War I) of the big employers like Swift’s, Armour’s,
and Wilson’ and their large numbers in the stockyards, their presence in
semiskilled and skilled butcher positions meant that black packinghouse
workers in the 1920s “feel more nearly on competitive equality with
white workers than in any industry in the city.”!9

Blacks owed their large-scale, strategic presence in the stockyards to
the packers’ massive wartime manpower needs and to the meatpacking
industry’s abundance of disagreeable (wet, filthy, exhausting, and gen-
erally unpleasant) tasks that matched conventional racist notions of “Ne-
gro work.” Also significant was the “divide and rule” calculation by
packinghouse managers that blacks were peculiarly resistant to, and/or
incapable of, joining the militant working-class movement that con-
fronted American industrial employers during and after the war and that
found a leading local expressions in Chicago’s Stockyards Labor Coun-
cil (SYLC).

It was with the SYLC in mind that Chicago packinghouse managers
in the 1920s recalled how “big business in the stockyards” used “the
black man” to “pull through” its wartime and postwar struggle with
“dangerous” and “radical” immigrant labor. Packinghouse officials in-
terviewed by the University of Chicago’s Alma Herbst in the mid-1920s
criticized “colored” workers for supposed inherent “laziness” and “inef-
ficiency,” but praised them for “loyalty and reliability during labor
troubles.” The chief reason for employing blacks “cited by every [stock-
yards] establishment,” Herbst found, “was fear of future strikes and
attempts to unionize the butchers.” That fear helps explain Blacks’ ris-
ing presence on the killing floors.2° Consistent with managerial reckon-
ing, the wartime labor movement probably never recruited more than 15
percent of the black workforce and blacks proved to be the packers’
most outwardly “loyal” workers in the 1920s.?!

THE RACE-CONSCIOUS LOGIC AND LIMITS OF
COMPANY LOYALTY

A contemporary stereotype white employers and white workers shared
portrayed black workers as tragic, docile victims of forces and actors
beyond their comprehension and control. Those forces and actors in-
cluded the legacy of southern paternalism, corporate racial paternalism,

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Street 25

and a northern black middle class that preached company loyalty to
black migrants in return for corporate money. But, as recent historical
literature shows, Chicago’s black packinghouse workers did not give the
meatpacking firms outward company loyalty in the pre-CIO stockyards
out of simple hopelessness or blind paternalization.

Their loyalty was given conditionally and on the basis of rational,
idealistic, and proud calculations reflecting the self-active impulses be-
hind the Great Migration. They offered it because the admittedly racist
packinghouse employers were—for reasons having little to do with their
supposed benevolent concern for “colored” workers—telatively “kind”
to black labor in terms of hiring and job placement. Black workers’
company loyalty was given also because the labor movement and
white-ethnic working-class culture in and around the stockyards were
more than just tinged by racism (the bloody Chicago race riot of 1919
was a tragic lesson in the racial attitudes of many white workers) and
because a Chicago packinghouse job provided a ticket out of oppressive
southern racism and into the relative racial freedom and autonomy of
the urban-industrial North. It reflected blacks’ practical, if perhaps some-
what self-fulfilling, judgement that unions could not win in the stock-
yards. Mediated by a proud race consciousness and a realistic calcula-
tion of black self-interest, black company loyalty in the stockyards was
contingent and reversible when and if—as occurred in the 1930s—the
employers came to be seen as working against black interests, northern
opportunities for “the race” collapsed, and a powerful and racially sensi-
tive new unionism emerged.?¢

Not surprisingly, such loyalty came with real limits. Given the overall
context of race relations 1n and around the pre-CIO Chicago stockyards,
the most remarkable fact may be that, as historian James Barrett has
shown, a considerable minority of black workers did support packing-
house unions during and after the war. While these early black trade
unionists were mostly atypical “northern [non-migrant] Negroes” with
long experience in Chicago industry, they showed that black workers
were capable of combining class- and race-consciousness in ways that
anticipated the CIO era.”?

The city’s black packinghouse workers in the non-union 1920s re-
sisted exploitation and discrimination in the workplace in more infor-
mal, subtle ways. They feigned stupidity. They exhibited an outward
fatalism that supervisors called “lack of hope on the job.” They were
often absent from work, according to managers and engaged in occa-
sional work stoppages, particularly on the pivotal killing floors.24 Man-

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26 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

agers and foremen chose to misinterpret (in the tradition of southern
plantation overseers) this behavior as evidence of “natural” Black “lazi-
ness,” unreliability, and inferiority.

This partial biack “loyalty” was conditioned by packinghouse em-
ployers’ racist/racialist evaluation of “colored” workers and their related
tendency to view all black workers as an undifferentiated mass. As one
Defender writer lectured black workers in 1923, “Negroes are employed
by the bunch in certain industries, or they are kept out as a group.”
Given managers’ notion—inherited from the South and supported in the
“scientific” industrial eugenics of the time—of black labor as inherently
“inefficient,” black workers especially depended for their relatively scarce
job opportunities on managers’ perception of them as “strike insur-
ance”— a uniformly loyal, non-union reserve of workers. Far less than
their white counterparts could black workers risk the appearance of
protest sentiment. “The Negro worker,” as NAACP official William
Dean Pickens noted in 1923, “cannot afford to be neutral” in labor-capital
conflicts. Since he more than his white counterpart burned employment
bridges both for himself and other workers of his race through joining a
union or strike, “he must be either for labor organization or against it.”2°

The only sort of union worth joining by this logic would have to be
one that was both committed to protecting black job rights and powerful
enough to do so. If they were fortunate enough to find such an organiza-
tion and then decided to join it, black workers would especially have to
fight to guarantee labor victory. For black workers would pay a higher
price for defeat than their white counterparts. Given what black workers
and community leaders perceived, with some justice, as the weakness
and racism of the labor movement and working class in and around the
pre-CIO stockyards, the anti- or non-union choice became, for them the
obvious one to make.

“THESE GUYS WORKED TOGETHER”:
EMPLOYER BETRAYAL AND INDUSTRIAL-UNIONIST
ANTI-RACISM IN THE 1930S

Racially discriminatory lay-offs in the Great Depression provided cru-
cial background for a new merging of black packinghouse workers’
race-conscious self-activity with the multi-ethnic working-class cause.
Between 1930 and 1940, packinghouse employers rewarded blacks’ his-
torical “strike insurance” role by reducing the latter’s share of Chicago

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Street 27

packinghouse jobs from over 31 percent to just under 20 percent. “As
unemployment sweeps the city,” the University of Chicago’s Alma Herbst
noted in 1932, blacks found themselves “fighting for the unskilled stock-
yards work which in Chicago has become traditionally ‘Negro.’” The
“first [and most commonly] fired” in the 1930s stockyards, blacks were
also the “last [re-] hired” when the economy showed signs of recovery.
As black Armour sheep butcher Elmer Thomas told Betty Burke of the
Federal Writers Project in 1939:76

When they raise a gang—that’s a term they use in the Yards when there’s
new men being hired—you can bet you won’t see any Negroes coming in.
Like in 1933, they were hiring young [white] boys, raw kids, didn’t know
a thing, but there was plenty of colored boys waiting for the same chance
who never got it. [PWOC’s] Hank Johnson said the other night . . . there
hadn’t been a Negro hired in Armour’s 1n seven years. He knows what
he’s talking about.

The “weeding out” of black labor during the Great Depression gave
black workers a chilling experience in the historical fruits of company
loyalty. Its lessons were not lost on black community leaders, who
dropped both much of their traditional public expressions of apprecia-
tion for the packers’ supposed corporate racial paternalism and their
aversion to trade unionism. The Chicago Defender stopped recommend-
ing that southern blacks come North. No longer were jobs in the city’s
steel mills, packinghouses, and Pullman Palace Car shops touted by
Chicago’s black middle-class as tickets to the Land of Freedom.?’

Still, blacks in the stockyards would not likely have shed their histori-
cal tendency to side with not-so benevolent white capital over labor
without the formation of a union remarkable in the sincerity and depth
of its commitment to racial justice and to black workers. Perhaps no-
where in northern industry was the black civil rights dimension of the
early CIO more evident than in Chicago’s stockyards. Chicago PWOC
activists used the threat of work stoppages on the killing floors—a re-
current and effective PWOC tactic—to end the practice by managers of
starring the black workers’ time cards in the Armour and Swift plants.
They opposed what they denounced as the packers’ “lily white”
job-ceiling, threatened to expel white union members who voiced racist
sentiments, and anticipated modern affirmative action when they won
from Swift & Company an early (Fall of 1937) agreement to hire blacks
“according to their proportion in Chicago’s population.” They encour-

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28 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

aged blacks to take an unlimited share of union offices, so that blacks
held nine of fifteen Chicago PWOC local union presidencies by 1939.
They encouraged white workers to accept black shop-stewards as their
shop-floor grievance representatives in the face of racial shaming by
white foremen and managers—an Irish-American Swift’s divisional su-
perintendent asked one Polish-American worker, “do you mean to say
you want this [Black] man to represent you? What’s the matter with you
and men like you—can’t you take care of your own affairs? PWOC
activists also criticized the absence of blacks in city transit jobs and
major league baseball, collected signatures in black churches against the
southern poll-tax, sponsored interracial social gatherings in a period
when “mixed” interaction was nearly taboo, and threatened union boy-
cotts against taverns and restaurants denying service to blacks. The PWOC
even demonstrated outside a white-ethnic South Side Catholic church
(St. Agnes) where black Armour workers attending the wedding of a
Polish-American co-worker had been harassed by racist parishioners.?8

Leading union official ‘Hank’ Johnson contributed to the PWOC’s
success with Black workers. The eloquent, barrel-chested “Negro orator
of the Yards” devastated timeworn white stereotypes of blacks as “poor
trade unionists,” excited the black rank-and-file for the CIO cause, and
helped legitimize that cause in the black community. Borrowed from the
CIO’s Steelworkers’ Organizing Committee for the packinghouse cam-
paign, Johnson was a Communist party member, the veteran of two race
riots, and the son of a proud, race-conscious member of the radical
Industrial Workers of the World. His writings in the PWOC’s newspa-
per coolly analyzed the union’s problems and possibilities. His lunch-hour
speeches in the packinghouse district brilliantly ridiculed the packers
and preached interracial working-class solidarity.?? It is an indication of
the union’s commitment to racial equality that Johnson handled negotia-
tions between the legendary Union Stockyards Transit Company (the
oldest establishment in the Yards) and mostly Irish-American livestock
handlers when the latter struck in the fall of 1938. Irish Americans had
been blacks’ most dangerous and persistent antagonists through decades
of racial tension on the rugged South Side.*°

By numerous contemporary accounts, some perhaps exaggerated in
their praise, the PWOC achieved notable success in breaking down ra-
cial divisions within the packinghouse workforce. Recalling earlier ra-
cial tensions in and around the stockyards, Elmer Thomas told Betty
Burke that “with the CIO in, that’s all like a bad dream gone... this

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Street 29

time the white men are with us.” He cited the case of an Irish-American
worker who amazed racist Armour officials by vouching for a black
worker seeking a loan from the company credit union, telling one man-
ager that “that Black boy’s my friend. He works with me. He’s a union
brother... and I’m with the union too.”?! According to the Chicago
Defender, a longstanding and vociferous critic of racism in Chicago
unions and neighborhoods, in the fall of 1939, the PWOC’s “fight to
abolish racial terror and discrimination” even transformed race relations
in the legendary, racist, white-ethnic “Back-of-the- Yards” neighborhood
(directly adjacent to the packinghouse district), where “No Negro better
show his face west of Ashland Avenue” had been a community slogan
since at least the 1919 Chicago race riots:

Today, because the PWOC planted the seed of unity in the stony soils of
Packingtown, Negroes walk freely and safely. Any public place which
refused them service would be quickly put out of business by a boycott of
white union members. On the very streets where danger once lurked for
Negroes, colored men stop for long chats about baseball with Polish or
Irish workers.

Oscar Hutton even found that the PWOC’s biracial influence filtered
down to Back-of-the-Yards children, who stopped “shouting derisive
statements” at blacks walking to and from the packinghouses.*

The PWOC’s advanced interracialism reflected the practical necessity
of organizing the largely black killing floors in the face of a strong
legacy of black strikebreaking in meatpacking. So powerful was the
combination of necessity and legacy that, as one PWOC activist told
Hutton, “the whites [would] not join until they saw what the Negroes
were going to do.” The union “faced the task of securing the support of
colored workers before organization could get under way.”>?

At the same time, the CIO packinghouse union tapped an underlying
biracial solidarity—an interracial shop-floor “fraternity” by the recollec-
tions of a leading black Chicago Swift’s CIO activist. That “fraternity”
was rooted in years of shared shop-floor experience that resulted from
managers’ introducing “colored” labor into most work departments dur-
ing World War I and the 1920s. Alma Herbst’s description of tasks and
wages In one section of a meatpacking establishment’s hog-killing de-
partment suggests a significantly color-blind routine in a notoriously
disagreeable and de-personalizing workplace milieu during the interwar
years:34

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30 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

A Negro man, who removes the head and cuts out the tongue, receives 50
cents an hour. The head is skinned by a white man who receives 49 cents
an hour. The same rate is paid for chiseling heads and templing them,
making snouts, cutting off lips, cutting out cheeks, trimming and skinning
the sterilized heads. The first four jobs are held by Negro men; a white
man and a Negro cut out the cheeks, and the remaining jobs are per-
formed by white men. Negro men in this same groups cut out eyelids,
split heads, grind and chop off the nostril, and grind out the teeth .. . two
white men receive 42 cents for pulling snouts and cutting ear-drums... .
The workers stand on brick floors with their backs against the wall, while
a line of hogs moves steadily not six feet distant. The light is artificial.
Both the material and the surroundings are excessively damp.

Reinforced by the shared traumas of the Great Depression and the re-
lated biracial appeal of the New Deal Democratic party, black and white
industrial workers found such workplace arrangements helped create
common interracial ground which redounded to the benefit of the CIO.
“We never had an incident,” recalled leading PWOC militant Herbert
March, “because of the Poles being mad at Blacks coming to union
meetings.” There existed a “certain relationship” between black and
white-ethnic workers that “just made sense... these guys worked to-
gether.”>°

Last but not least, PWOC’s aggressive interracialism reflected a sig-
nificant Leftist presence in Chicago’s Black Belt and in the CIO pack-
inghouse union. The Communist party’s (CP) black civil nights and
relief activism on Chicago’s South Side during the early 1930s ener-
gized a number of black workers who later became leading PWOC
members, providing them important lessons in direct action techniques
and the possibilities for interracial protest.>° Later in the decade, the CP
placed activists on the executive board of each major Chicago PWOC
local. It claimed the stockyards’ two leading activists (‘Hank’ Johnson
and Herbert March) and had what leading party and union militant
Herbert March (a pre-CIO veteran of CP civil rights/anti-lynching cam-
paigns in the Southwest and the Chicago PWOC’s only open party
member) recalls as “several hundred” members in the Chicago stock-
yards of the late 1930s.3’ Its members in the PWOC embraced the idea
of racial equality as both a practical organizing tool and a core principle
of political belief. Placing special emphasis on working-class racial di-
visions as explanation for past labor defeats in meatpacking and other
leading industries, they worked with a “religious” and “crusading” zeal

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Street 31

to keep the notion of, and necessity for racial equality “constantly be-
fore the membership.’”*®

The party’s presence in the PWOC in Chicago may have partly re-
sulted from blacks’ still large and strategic presence in the city’s
meatpacking industry. While earlier generations of stockyards militants
had not uncommonly referred to “colored” workers as “ignorant,” “hope-
less,” and “docile,” some 1930s Communists thought in romantic terms
of a black Proletarian “vanguard.” As early as the late 1920s, the origi-
nal wartime Stockyards Labor Council (SYLC) leader turned top CP
official and presidential candidate William Z. Foster claimed that “dou-
bly” exploited black workers could provide an especially militant, possi-
bly radical segment of the American working-class:

They are a tremendous source of potential revolutionary strength and
vigor. They have a double oppression as workers and Negroes to fill them
with fighting spirit and resentment against capitalism. It has been one of
the most serious errors of the left wing to underestimate and to neglect the
development of this great proletarian fighting force.

Foster maintained a special influence with Communist Chicago pack-
inghouse activists for whom “the Black worker was this country’s Achil-
les heel” [emphasis added}?

ALL OR NOTHING AND FIGHT OVER FLIGHT

Yet more than discriminatory lay-offs, an increasingly long-term shared
workplace experience (for lay-off survivors) with white workers, and
Left-led union interracialism created black workers’ special militancy in
the 1930s Chicago stockyards. The logic behind that militancy was both
more “internal” to the distinctive experience and consciousness of black
workers and more curiously continuous with their previous outward
company loyalty. In a 1970 interview, former Armour’s PWOC shop-
steward Sophie Koscilowski retrospectively speculated that the particu-
larly subordinate, declining workplace position of blacks’ made them
more “courageous . .. maybe because they felt they didn’t have much to
lose.”40

African American workers’ distinctive, precarious position in the pack-
inghouses encouraged militancy in a different way. Given traditional
labeling of them as inferior workers useful mainly as inexpensive “strike

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32 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

insurance,” black workers in the stockyards had previously felt espe-
cially pressured to adopt an outwardly deferential attitude toward their
employers. Once they burned the increasingly frayed paternalist bridge
through participation in the CIO, their stake in the success of the PWOC—
sworn as it was to specially defend black job interests—was especially
great. They less than white workers could afford to embrace the CIO
cause in a lukewarm way. Their “all-or-nothing” position became a
weapon for the PWOC, helping explain why some black packinghouse
workers made particularly sudden, dramatic shifts from outward com-
pany loyalty to militant union allegiance.*!

This “all-or-nothing” logic complemented a “fight over flight” logic
to black militancy. Given widespread racial discrimination in 1930s
layoffs, black packinghouse workers were especially restricted in their
ability to escape worsening Depression-era packinghouse job conditions
(accelerated work speed, rising foreman abuse, and reduced wages, for
example). Given their inability to find other work, black packinghouse
workers, even more than white workers in the 1930s, seeking to im-
prove their working conditions had to do so through action in their
current workplace.*

DOWN ON THE KILLING FLOOR:
BLACK WORKPLACE RESOURCES

The new black militancy reflected black workers’ sense of power and
pride as well as their feelings of betrayal, desperation, and entrapment.
Relatively unburdened by the sometimes disabling memory of previous
crushing union defeats that haunted many older white workers,* blacks
in the stockyards brought some distinct advantages to the CIO cause.
Their persistent, even deepening position “down on the killing floors”—
in the industry’s historical strongholds of technically irreplaceable knife
skill, working-class shop-floor “manliness,” and workplace bargaining
power—had given rise to a number of “natural” black shop-floor “lead-
ers” even before the rise of the biracial PWOC. It was on the “kill and
cut,” where legendarily rugged packinghouse workers were least “timid”
and where workers could most effectively protest the employers’ driv-
ing work regime (by damaging materials and “bottlenecking” the labor
process), that packinghouse unionism’s leading organic shop-floor re-
sisters had always emerged.

Early black PWOC worker-activists and local union presidents
Jefferson Beckley (from Armour’s), Phillip Weightman (Swift’s), Ken

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Street 33

Collins (Wilson’s), Samuel Clemens, Pete Brown, and Jesse Vaughn
(the last three headed PWOC locals in a handful of independent,
medium-sized porkpacking plants known as the “little six”) hardly re-
ceived their first introduction to the “long tradition of [work] stoppages”
on the killing floors from Communist and other PWOC activists. They
learned about and internalized the game of rank-and-file shop-floor re-
sistance on the “kill and cut” before the rise of the CIO. They built on
this experience to develop the tactic of undertaking “quickie” job ac-
tions, leaving valuable, highly perishable materials to waste and stop-
ping the “endless chain” of packinghouse work until grievances found
resolution. They helped make Chicago’s killing floors in the late 1930s
into turbulent hotbeds of direct workplace action on behalf of union
recognition, racial justice, and a new measure of rank-and-file work
control, creating what Armour managers considered a “chaotic” shop-floor
environment.*4

Some black PWOC pioneers brought to the CIO cause prior organiza-
tional skills related to their shop-floor status and skill. Brown and Vaughn
had headed locals of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Work-
men (the PWOC’s AFL rival) prior to the PWOC’s formation, suggest-
ing pre-CIO origins to the special black militancy and biracialism of the
industrial workers’ movement in the 1930s stockyards.*° Phillip Weight-
man had been a rank-and-file leader in Swift & Company’s anti-union
system of welfare-capitalism. A highly skilled hog-butcher with a his-
tory of engaging in informal killing-floor job actions and getting griev-
ances settled through personal discussion with supervisors, Weightman
managed the welfarist Swift company’s all-black “Swift Premiums” base-
ball team in the mid-1930s and possessed considerable influence with
managers. After his days as a self-described “Swift-oriented company
man” ended in 1938, when he failed to secure the re-hiring of a white
co-worker who he felt had been wrongly fired and read the National
Labor Relations (Wagner) Act (concluding that the new legislation gave
industrial unionism substantive legal backing in the stockyards),
Weightman’s formidable shop-floor presence became a key weapon for
the fledgling CIO local at the Chicago Swift’s plant.*®

“THE NEGRO IS MOST ARTICULATE”:
BLACK CULTURAL RESOURCES

The facts that the special black militancy noted by contemporary
observers of the late 1930s stockyards was not limited to male workers

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34 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

and that blacks played leading roles in city unionization drives outside
the stockyards suggests that part of the explanation for special black
militancy in the stockyards lay in black experience and culture beyond
shop-floor and union. Women held few if any strategic knife positions
on the killing floors and none of the highly skilled knife jobs. They
maintained little presence in pre-CIO unions and employee representa-
tion plans. And there was no other industry in interwar Chicago where
blacks attained strategic workplace positions remotely parallel to that
reached by black workers in meatpacking.*’

Black culture directly complemented workplace and labor-market mili-
tancy in Chicago’s stockyards. A PWOC leader reported that blacks’
facility with the English language gave them an edge over workers of
Eastern European ancestry in playing leadership roles within the union.
“The Negro,” the PWOC activist told Cayton, “is best informed on
union procedure and is most articulate. The foreign groups understand
but aren’t articulate because of language difficulties.”48 African Ameri-
cans’ rich and highly expressive culture of song, aggressive public speak-
ing, and preaching*? merged well with a CIO “movement culture,” which
challenged workers to transcend their private fears by engaging in dra-
matic public actions and demonstrations.*°

Education as the Path

The black community’s distinctive emphasis on education as a path to
personal and “race” advancement?! also played a significant role in
blacks’ union leadership. Black Belt residents exhibited higher rates of
elementary and high school attendance and graduation than inhabitants
of the predominantly Polish and Lithuanian Back-of-the-Yards.>2 Ac-
cording to leading Chicago industrial employers in 1926, educational
attainments enabled black workers to play a leading role in company-
sponsored employee representation plans during the 1920s.>3 Black work-
ers articulated PWOC demands to supervisors and management and
performed key PWOC tasks such as handling grievances with manage-
ment, writing union shop-papers, and speaking to fellow workers about
the benefits of organization.

Leading PWOC activist Herbert March remembered that black Armour
workers who possessed college and professional degrees became some
of the local’s most effective, articulate union leaders. March’s recollec-
tion suggests a curious way in which black educational attainments
interacted with the racial inequities of Chicago’s professional and cleri-

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Street 35

cal job market to deepen the logic of blacks’ ascendance to positions of
leadership within the union. A disproportionate number of highly edu-
cated black Chicagoans could not find employment matching their quali-
fications. Blacks with college and even graduate degrees worked as
Pullman porters, rail-station “red caps,” hotel bellhops, and stockyard
laborers. These remarkable, not-so “rank-and-file” black workers had
special talents for which they found no outlet in the operations of a
discriminatory economic system. For some of these highly educated
black workers, the distinctly anti-racist PWOC provided a logical outlet.*4

They did so proudly, with little of the debilitating shame that is com-
monly associated with employment below one’s qualifications. As a
black Chicago physician told Cayton and Drake, “social position doesn’t
depend on the kind of work you do. There are a lot of my fraternity
brothers who ‘went on the road’ [worked as Pullman Porters or dining-car
waiters] after they got out of school. And there are plenty of [black]
fellows with university degrees working in the big hotels.” This remark
highlighted what Cayton and Drake found to be “a peculiarity of the
Negro social-status scale in America: a heavier weighting of education
than of occupation. With a very narrow occupational spread, education
is used to mark off social divisions within the same general occupational
level.””>° This reflected the black community’s broad understanding that
the northern job market was unfairly stacked against even highly edu-
cated blacks and that community’s focus on education as a source of
status in and of itself.

Working-class Preachers

Differences in black and white working-class religious practice on
Chicago’s South Side also contributed to black leadership in the CIO
packinghouse union. It would hardly be accurate to describe the domi-
nant religious institution in white packinghouse workers’ lives, the Catho-
lic church, as opposed to the union cause in the twentieth-century Chi-
cago stockyards. Historians of Chicago’s heavily researched white-ethnic
Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood have shown how Catholic pastors sup-
ported Saul Alinksy’s famous Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Coun-
cil (formed in 1939), which in turn offered vital support to the CIO.
Ethnic pastors supported the SYLC during World War I and walked
picket lines during the national meatpacking strike of 1946. At a pivotal
moment in PWOC’s struggle for a contract with Armour’s in 1939, the
PWOC received crucial support from liberal Chicago Bishop Bernard Sheil.>®

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36 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

It is significant, however, that, as Harold Preece found, twenty of the
Chicago Armour CIO local’s fifty black shop-stewards in the fall of
1939 were “storefront preachers.”°’ While an often-conservative, full-time
clergy (initially very suspicious of the PWOC’s Communist connec-
tions*®) exercised relatively authoritarian rule over a handful of large,
ornate, and highly formal Catholic parishes in the white-ethnic
Back-of-the-Yards, the most ubiquitous religious institution in the Black
Belt was the often bare bones storefront church. St. Clair Drake identi-
fied 338 such churches in Chicago’s Depression-era black community.
According to Drake and Cayton:

Of Bronzeville’s nearly 500 religious congregations, only one in five
worships in a regular church edifice. The remainder praise the Lord in
vacant stores and in houses, abandoned theaters, remodeled garages, and
halls. These small churches tend to be concentrated on rundown, low-rent
business streets and in generally undesirable residential areas. One street
alone has 90 to a three-mile stretch, or 1.9 per block. There members tend
to be drawn from areas relatively close to the church. On the whole they
show visible evidence of low social status—illiterate scrawls for bulletin
boards, tasteless ornamentation, untrained ministers, a low-income mem-
bership, “shouting” worshipers. The members have often drifted away
from larger churches.

Usually run by a weekday wage-earner who “felt the call to minis-
try,” the commonly Pentecostal or Baptist storefronts served as “decid-
edly lower class churches” that permitted “the widest range of personal
expression.” Unlike their white counterparts in the larger Catholic par-
ishes, storefront preachers lacked formal theological training and preached
the CIO cause on the basis partly of their ongoing experiences on filthy
and dangerous packinghouse shop-floors. Their qualifications lay in their
abilities to entertain and awe congregations with dramatic bible-laden
oratory, to maintain threadbare storefront finances, and to recruit new
parishioners. The large number of would-be preachers competing for
followers among a mostly impoverished and skeptical black population
during the 1930s put special premiums on these abilities.

Cayton and Drake encountered a successful South Side preacher who
used savings from his wages in the packinghouses to purchase a small
apartment building. This storefront minister rented out the upstairs, turned
the downstairs into a church, erected a loudspeaker, and received assis-
tance from his wife in canvassing surrounding blocks for members. If he
was like most of the more popular storefront preachers, he treated pa-

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Street 37

rishioners to a showy display of Fundamentalist theology painting stark
portraits of a strict and judgmental God “who gave his only begotten
son to save a sin-sick world.” Storefront sermons included “diatribes
against card-playing and dancing, attendance at movies and baseball
games on Sunday and ‘putting the world before Christ.’” They preached
“justification by faith, declaring that a man is not saved because he is
good, but will act good because he’s saved.” They were commonly
punctuated and interrupted by parishioners, who encouraged their minis-
ter to “preach it” and “tell it like it is.”

Those interruptions fit the storefront’s distinctly egalitarian code. “The
poorest man in the church,” one storefront member told Cayton and
Drake, “is just as big as the richest.” Proclaiming the equality of all men
in their common judgement by a stem and leveling Lord, storefront
theology hardly justified the deep inequalities of class and race in 1930s
Chicago. At the same time, storefront members expressed their desires
for associating with people of like (lower-class) status and for being
heard and known within their congregation regardless of their wealth
and status. As one storefront parishioner told Cayton and Drake, “you
have to go to one of the large churches early on Sunday to get a seat,
you have to be dressed in a style or you feel out of place, and there is
not as much friendship in large church as in one of these store-fronts. In
a big church the preacher don’t know you unless you make big dona-
tions or you are an officer of some kind. With my church it 1s different.
We are more like churches in the South—everybody is recognized.””>?

Including at least one PWOC local union president (“Reverend Lee”
of the “Levi Casings” plant®), black packinghouse worker-preachers
brought spiritual zeal, egalitarian sentiments, and useful organizational,
rhetorical, and leadership skills to the CIO cause. Like the CIO packing-
house union, the small churches run by storefront preachers were volun-
tary associations that depended on contributions from lower-class pa-
rishioners, democratic participation, and rank-and-file leadership. Also
like the PWOC, they depended on the charisma of “natural leaders”
within the working-class black community and on personal contact be-
tween those leaders and the more ordinary rank-and-file.®!

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38 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

“MIDDLE CLASS” ASSOCIATIONS

The storefront church was not the only institution of black Chicago
community life that provided skills, contacts, and ideas that likely in-
formed black CIO militancy in the stockyards. Among other organiza-
tions that made up black Chicago’s “intricate and complex web of vol-
untary associations” during the 1930s were the community’s large num-
ber of more outwardly “middle-class” churches, fraternal lodges, and
recreational (athletic, musical, dance, card-playing, and theatrical) clubs.
Along with the community’s leading civic institutions—the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Chicago
Urban League—these organizations provided numerous opportunities
for the development of the sort of leadership that unions required. While
such organizations generally emphasized middle-class “respectability,”
distinguishing themselves from the world of the black lower class, they
were open to packinghouse laborers who exhibited what their leaders
called “correct behavior” and a “proper respect for getting ahead.’

Also significant in influencing and sustaining black labor militancy
was the Chicago Defender. Purchased by at least 40,000 black belt
residents each week and widely discussed throughout black Chicago,
the middle-class Defender was militantly dedicated to editor Robert
Abbot’s ideal of “complete equality of Negroes with white people.”
Even with the onset of World War II, it refused to tone down its harsh
criticism of American racism within and beyond Chicago, resisting gov-
ernment officials’ pleas for unqualified support of the military effort.
Once it came over to the side of industrial unionism, the stridently and
relentlessly race-conscious Defender was a potent black cultural weapon
in the CIO arsenal.”

RACE CONSCIOUSNESS AS A CIO RESOURCE

The one common theme and aspiration uniting the diverse organiza-
tions that comprised black Chicago’s associational life in the 1930s was
race consciousness—a fundamental and underlying concern with “ad-
vancing the race” and solidarity between blacks of different position and
status. That consciousness, reflected in black workers’ persistent ten-
dency to refract the lessons of their industrial experience through the
prism of race, had mainly worked against packinghouse unionism dur-
ing previous organizing drives. It revealed a new capacity to support
and energize labor militancy in the stockyards of the CIO era.

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Street 39

On the basis of interviews with hundreds of black Chicagoans during
the 1930s, Cayton and Drake found that blacks’ inferior status and mi-
nority position convinced African Americans of the futility of indi-
vidualism and the necessity for group solidarity:©

Although Negroes of all class levels stress individual initiative as a factor
in “racial advancement,” they are keenly aware that as a separate subordi-
nate group in American life, the dice are loaded against the individual.
Everybody knows that “no matter how high a Negro gets, he’s still just a
Negro.” Race consciousness breeds a demand for racial solidarity . . . they
see their ultimate hope in presenting some sort of united front against the
world.

In Chicago as in the Jim Crow South, the African American community
“placed,” in Robin D.G. Kelley’s words, “more emphasis on communal
values and collective uplift than the prevailing . . . individualist ideology
of the white ruling-classes.”©° Such thinking closely corresponded with
the inherently anti-individualist cultural requirements of labor move-
ments. Unions depend on the notion that the odds of marketplace capi-
talism are stacked against (working-class) individuals and that working
people must present a “united front” against employers and those who
support the bosses.*’ Once divorced from the discredited strategy of
company loyalty and linked to the union cause, this race consciousness
isolated those in the black community who still wished to criticize par-
ticipation in the labor movement and complemented the all-or-nothing
logic of black trade unionism.

Black race consciousness simultaneously informed black labor mili-
tancy in a more individualistic fashion. In Cayton and Drake’s findings,
black Chicagoans disproportionately denied access to the city’s better
jobs and homes expressed “race pride” in compensatory ways, including
leadership in civic organizations and other activities. “Race heroes” such
as boxer Joe Louis and track-and-field star Jesse Owens “beat whites at
their own game” and were “fearless in their approach to white people.”
This rugged, race-conscious mentality found expression through black
workers’ many dramatic confrontations with white foremen and manag-
ers on the chronically turbulent killing floors. Race consciousness also
encouraged black workers to take a primary role on the shop floor and
in the labor movement. As Oscar Hutton found in 1939, Hank Johnson’s
success in recruiting black packinghouse workers reflected his position
“as a symbol of the New Negro in the trade union movement.”®

Black workers’ historical race consciousness further helped make them

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40 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

the best PWOC members by giving a double meaning to their activism.
Hank Johnson spoke for many black PWOC members when he told the
Chicago Defender in 1939 that:®

The present conflict at Armour & Company is more than a battle between
a corporation and a union. It is also another chapter in the long epic of the
Negro people. The PWOC has not only protected workers in their rights
as workers but in their rights as citizens [emphasis added]. Since the
coming of the PWOC, Negroes entitled to promotion have a better chance
of getting it because the union feels that every man has the nght to
advance according to his ability, whatever of his color.

In the stockyards as elsewhere, the unionization campaign of the 1930s
represented a movement for democratic self-expression and civic inclu-
sion for all industrial workers.’? But black packinghouse workers
espeically perceived the PWOC as something more than a practical,
economic struggle for “bread and butter.” They saw the CIO as part of
an older, democratic freedom struggle for equal nghts. The point emerges
strikingly from the comments of Jim Cole, an African American beef
butcher who started working in the stockyards in 1919, the year of a
bloody race riot on Chicago’s South Side. Twenty years later, Cole told
Betty Burke:7!

I don’t care if the union don’t do another lick of work raising our wages
or settling our grievances about anything [emphasis added]. Ill always
believe they done the greatest thing in the world getting everybody who
works in the Yards together, and breaking up the hate and bad feelings
that used to be held against the Negro.

Nineteenth-century European workers’ struggle to wrest democratic,
human rights from feudal and absolutist structures empowered them in
their battles with employers.’* Similarly, many black workers in the
stockyards viewed the PWOC cause as part of a related quest for race
equality. Generations of class- and race-based exploitation—what Com-
munist theoreticians and onetime stockyards activist William Z. Foster
termed “double oppression’”—combined with the packers’ discrimina-
tory workplace practices to ensure that black labor militancy in the
stockyards expressed material self-interests as well as the more out-
wardly idealistic quest for racial justice.’?

Black workers’ race-conscious activity directly influenced the direc-
tion of PWOC activism. The union’s racial policies reflected the role

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Street 41

played by black activists as well as the interracial strategies and beliefs
of leading white militants. Since black militants entered the union early—
“on the ground floor,” as Oscar Hutton put it—the PWOC’s black civil
rights dimension reflected as well as attracted black worker-activists
who made no distinctions between traditional union objectives and the
more seemingly idealistic goal of racial justice.”

In a suggestive historiographical essay published twenty years ago,
leading American labor historian David Montgomery referred to the
“simultaneous emergence of union, political, and race consciousness
among Chicago’s black packinghouse workers” during the late 1930s.’
The process described here is better described as the potent merging of
those workers’ historical race consciousness with an unprecedentedly
strong union or class consciousness on their part. That consciousness
expressed itself through a new black worker militancy that was largely
continuous with previous mostly non-union, black labor strategies for
attaining security and freedom in the northern industrial metropolis.
Like the racist, divide-and-rule personnel tactics that the packers’ had
used with anti-union success over previous decades, black workers’ ra-
cially centered world view now revealed itself as a double-edged knife,
capable of energizing class struggle and consciousness in the stock-
yards.

The packers’ racial divide-and-rule personnel practices backfired—
one might even say boomeranged—in the late 1930s. The predomi-
nantly black killing floors, whose racial composition reflected manag-
ers’ historical calculation that “colored” workers provided the best in-
surance policy against labor disruption in the Yards’ most pivotal work
departments, became centers of direct workplace action in the name of
industrial unionism. Incredulous Chicago packinghouse managers pre-
dictably blamed radical “outside agitators” for the new interracial and
black labor militancy in their workplace establishments.’ They were
not entirely mistaken. Some leading activists in the Chicago PWOC,
including leading militants Herbert March and Hank Johnson, were in
fact Communists with origins outside the local industry. And, by all
accounts (even that of the subsequently anti-Communist Phillip
Weightman), Communists spearheaded the remarkable racial coopera-
tion that made the PWOC attractive to black packinghouse workers and
helped break through potent working-class racial divisions in meat-
packing.”

But equally significant in explaining the new black militancy were
the deep racial inequities of the employers’ workplace regime (laid bare

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42 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

by racially discriminatory firings in the 1930s), black workers’ long-term
presence in strategic and often skilled jobs, the relative racial mixing of
packinghouse work over the interwar years, and black workers’ distinc-
tive cultural and community resources and consciousness. In linking
their aspirations to the union cause on an unprecedented scale, Chicago’s
black packinghouse workers showed like never before that class- and
race-consciousness were neither inevitably nor absolutely opposed to
one another. They also revealed that their own racially distinct experi-
ence, culture, community, and consciousness provided special resources
for, and contributions to, labor resistance. When they rejected traditional
trade-union stereotypes of black workers as helpless, paternalized tools
of the employer and inherently “poor trade unionists,” CIO activists in
Chicago’s stockyards tapped and helped articulate but did not create this
deeper, internal logic of black labor militancy. It is likely that a similar
logic was at work in other settings where we are learning that black
workers took a significant, even leading role in the industrial unioniza-
tion efforts of the 1930s and 1940s.

NOTES

Special thanks to Roger Horowitz and Rick Halpern, whose remarkable oral
history project has immeasurably deepened my understanding of the social history
of Chicago’s meatpacking industry and the CIO packinghouse union. Thanks also
to two anonymous referees for their first-rate suggestions and to Bruce C. Nelson,
Paul Kleppner, and James Barrett, for excellent critical commentary on earlier
drafts.

1. Arthur Kampfert, “A History of Unions in the Meatpacking Industry,” un-
published manuscript [1944], State Historical Society of Wisconsin, volume 4, part
3 (pagination unclear), section entitled “Unionism in the Chicago Wilson & Com-
pany Plant,” p. “2C”; Midwest Daily Record, 16 February 1938; Catherine Lewis,
“Trade Union Policies in Regard to the Negro in Slaughtering and Meatpacking”
(M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1946), p. 73.

2. Paul Street, “Breaking Up Old Hatreds and Breaking Through the Fear: the
Emergence of the Packinghouse Workers’ Organizing Committee in Chicago, 1933-
1940,” Studies in History and Politics, 5 (1986): 68-85; Robert Zieger, The CIO:
1935-1955 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), pp. 22—93.

3. Harold Preece, “What Goes on in Packingtown?,” Chicago Defender, 23
September 1939, p. 15.

4. Oscar Hutton, “The Negro Worker and the Labor Unions of Chicago” (M.A.
thesis, University of Chicago, 1939), pp. 103-106, 113. For a different reference to
black workers as the “backbone” of unionization efforts in the Chicago stockyards,
see Studs Terkel’s interview with Frank Lumpkin in Terkel, Race: How Blacks and
Whites Feel About the American Obsession (New York, 1992), p. 91.

5. Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life
in a Northern City (New York, 1945), p. 309.

6. Transcribed interview with former leading Chicago PWOC militant and Com-

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Street 43

munist Herbert March by Elizabeth Balanoff, 16-17 November 1970 [hereafter
‘March Recollections”], Roosevelt University Oral and Labor History Collection
[hereafter “ROLC’’], pp. 40, 87, 96-97; taped interview with Herbert March by Les
O’rear, Illinois Labor History Society, Chicago, Illinois, 1982 [hereafter “March
ILHS tape”], p. 87; March ILHS tape; author’s interview with Stella Nowicki,
Chicago, IL, 12 November 1983; Street, “Breaking Up Old Hatreds,” pp. 69, 73;
Paul Street, “The Logic and Limits of ‘Plant Loyalty:’ Black Workers, White La-
bor, and Corporate Racial Paternalism in Chicago’s Stockyards, 1916-1940,” Jour-
nal of Social History, v. 29. no. 3 (March 1996), pp. 672-673; Lizabeth Cohen,
Making a New Deal: Chicago's Industrial Workers, 1919-1939 (New York, 1991),
pp. 335, 350; Preece, “What Goes On”; Paul Street, “Working in the Yards: A
History of Class Relations in Chicago’s Meatpacking Industry, 1886-1955" (Ph.D.
diss. Binghamton University, 1993), pp. 646-651; Barbara Wayne Newell, Chicago
and the Labor Movement: Metropolitan Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana, Ill., 1961),
p. 167; transcribed interview with Leon Beverly by Elizabeth Bitters, 16 December
1970, ROLC, p. 3; interview with Elmer Thomas by Betty Burke, Federal Wniters’
Project, 1939, reproduced in Ann Banks, First Person America (New York, 1980),
p. 70; Volunteer Organizers’ List (n.d.), Files of the United Packinghouse Workers
of America, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis.

7. Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, p. 314.

8. Interview with Anna Novack by Betty Burke, Federal Writers’ Project, 1939,
reproduced in Banks, First Person, p. 64; transcribed interview with Sophie
Kosciolowski, by Elizbath Balanoff, ROLHC, 1970, p. 21.

9. David Brody, “The CIO Fifty Years After,” Dissent (Fall, 1985): 467. For
other examples of blacks as among the “best” or leading CIO participants during
the 1930s and 1940s, see George Schuyler, “Negro Workers Lead Great Lakes
Steel Drive,” Pittsburgh Courier, 31 July 1937, reprinted in Phillip S. Foner and
Ronald Lewis, eds., Black Workers: A Documentary History From Colonial Times
to the Present (Philadelphia, 1989); Horace Cayton and George Mitchell, Black
Workers and the New Unions (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1939), p. 202; Michael Honey,
Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana,
Ill., 1993), pp. 116, 135-139, 155; Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama
Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990), pp. 142-143;
Hutton, “The Negro Worker,” pp. 82—103; Robert Korstad, “Daybreak of Freedom:
Tobacco Workers and the CIO in Winston-Salem, 1943-1950” (Ph.D. diss., Uni-
versity of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 1987); Street, “Logic and Limits”; Cohen,
Making a New Deal, p. 335; Rick Halpern, “Interracial Unionism 1n the Southwest:
Fort Worth’s, Packinghouse Workers, 1937—1954,” in Organized Labor in the Twen-
tieth Century South, ed. Robert Zieger (Knoxville, TN, 1991), p. 162; Roger
Horowitz, “The Path Not Taken: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in
Meatpacking, 1930-1960” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1990),
pp. 58, n.40, 391-92; Rick Halpern, “Organized Labor, Black Workers, and the
Twentieth-Century South: the Emerging Revision,” in Race and Class in the Ameri-
can South, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Halpern (Oxford, 1994), pp. 45, 61-75.

10. Ernest Poole, “The Meat Strike,” Independent, 58 (July 28, 1904): 80-82;
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York, 1981 [1905]), pp. 66, 274-75; William
Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York, 1970), pp. 108—
156; Barrett, Work and Community, pp. 202-224, 254-255; James Grossman, Land
of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989),
pp. 208-245; Alma Herbst, The Negro in the Meatpacking and Slaughtering Indus-
try (Boston, 1932), pp. xxi—xx1i, 36-37, 63-65, 75, 127-47; Street “Working in the
Yards,” pp. 290-355.

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44 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

11. Hutton, “The Negro Worker,” p. 112.

12. This and the following paragraph rely on Street, “Breaking Up Old Ha-
treds,” pp. 65-74; Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White
Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904-1954 (Urbana, Ill., 1997), pp. 96-200;
Roger Horowitz, ‘Negro and White Unite and Fight:” A Social History of Indus-
trial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-1990 (Urbana, Ill., 1997), pp. 1-124; Rick
Halpern and Roger Horowitz, Meatpackers: an Oral History of Black Packinghouse
Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (New York, 1996);
Rick Halpern, “Race and Radicalism in the Chicago Stockyards,” in Unionizing the
Jungles: Labor and Community in the Twentieth-Century Meatpacking Industry,
ed. Shelton Stromquist and Marv Bergman (Iowa City, 1997), pp. 75—95; Drake
and Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 312-341; Robert Zieger, American Workers,
American Unions, 1920-1985 (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 51-53; Zieger, The CIO, pp.
83-85; Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 45-46, 164-65, 204, 206, 333-337; Honey,
Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, 117—144, 155; Phil Foner, Organized La-
bor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973 (New York, 1976), pp. 215-237; David
Brody, Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth-Century Struggle
(New York, 1980), p. 98; Michael Goldfield, “Race and the CIO: the Possibilities
for Racial Egalitarianism During the 1930s and 1940s,” International Labor and
Working-Class History, 44 (Fall 1993): 1-32; Michael Goldfield, The Color of
Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New Y ork, 1997); Halpern,
“Organized Labor, Black Workers,” pp. 45, 61-73; Horowitz, “The Path Not Taken,”
pp. 4, 36-38, 74-78, 84-85, 208-213, 219-224, 229-232, 236-238, 243-249, 257,
282-284, 296-338, 391-392, 394; Street, “Working in the Yards,” 296-302, 556—
57, 594, 606-07, 655-666.”

13. Cohen supplements such analysis with a cultural explanation of worker
militancy, including that of black workers, in the 1930s. See Cohen, Making a New
Deal, pp. 138-143, 157-58, 208-21, 323-333. But Cohen’s emphasis on
working-class cultural homogenization resulting from the Americanizing influence
of mass culture and welfare capitalism in the interwar years does not seem particu-
larly well-suited to the racial dimensions of working-class social history in and
around Chicago’s stockyards. At the same time that ethnic differences between
different white-ethnic groups faded significantly on Chicago’s South Side, racial
apartheid continued to define black working-class social and cultural experience
and may have actually worsened through the interwar period. See Cayton and Drake,
Black Metropolis, pp. 99-263, 379-387; Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White,’ p. 65.

14. Street, “Logic and Limits,” pp. 672-675; Halpern, Down on the Killing
Floors, chaps. four and five; Halpern, “Race and Radicalism”; Street, “Working in
the Yards,” chaps. 5, 9, 10; Horowitz, “Negro and White,” chaps. 1-5. The first
treatment or discovery of this conjuncture is curiously unacknowledged in recent
published historical work on the 1930s stockyards (except in Street, “Logic and
Limits,” n. 60). It is Street, “Breaking Up Old Hatreds” (cited above) based on Paul
Street, “The Rise of the Chicago Packinghouse Workers’ Organizing Committee,
1933-1940,” paper delivered at the Chicago Area Labor History Group, Newberry
Library, Chicago, Ill., May 21, 1983.

15. Robin D.G. Kelley, ““We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Working-
Class Black Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History (June
1993): 75-112; Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black
Working Class (New York, 1994); Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Robert Korstad and
Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early
Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History (December 1988): 786—111;

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Street 45

Honey, Southern Labor; Korstad, “Daybreak of Freedom”; Halpern, “Organized
Labor, Black Workers.”

16. Lorenzo Green and Carter Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner (Washington
D.C., 1930), pp. 272-74; George Haynes, The Negro at Work During the World
War and During Reconstruction (Washington D.C., 1921), pp. 54-55; Herbst, The
Negro, pp. xvii—66; Barrett, Work and Community, p. 48; Paul Taylor, Mexican
Labor in the U.S.: the Calumet Region (Berkeley, Calif., 1930), pp. 40, 66—123;
U.S., Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of Population, 4 (Washington D.C.,
1932), pp. 447-450; Estelle Hill Scott, Occupational Changes Among Negroes in
Chicago (Chicago, 1939), pp. 217-18; ““Palmer’s New City,” no. 7, 1923, pp. 4-6 in
Mary McDowell Papers, Chicago Historical Society, Box 3, folder 15, p. 6; Will-
iam Z. Foster, “The Organization of Negro Workers,” Daily Worker, 16 May 1929.

17. Kate Adams, Humanizing a Great Industry (Chicago, 1919), p. 21; Herbst,
The Negro, pp. xviti-xxii, 70, 76-80, 85, 89. 112, 171; Street, “Working in the
Yards,” chaps. 5, 6.

18. U.S., Census, Occupations [see note 17] (1930), pp. 447-450; Drake and
Cayton, Black Metropolis, p. 112; Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 36, 207, 354;
Walter Fogel, The Negro in the Meat Industry (Philadelphia, 1970), pp. 29, 45-6;
Scott, Occupational Changes, pp. 221-22; Chicago Daily Defender, 20 August
1927, p. 10: “Race Pays Tribute to Great Magnates.

19. Herbst, The Negro, xviii—xxiii, 70, 76-80, 85, 89, 112, 171 (Herbst quota-
tion from p. xiii); Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 214-252; Mary Eliza-
beth Pidgeon, The Employment and Growth of Women in Slaughtering and
Meatpacking (Washington D.C., 1932), pp. 20, 31, 51, 53; Etstelle Hill Scott,
Occupational Changes Among Negroes in Chicago (Chicago, 1939), pp. 233-34,
242; Horowitz, “The Path Not Taken,” pp. 208-211, 223—224; “Working in the
Yards,” pp. 112-115, 299-301; Kampfert, “A History,” vol. 3, p. 22; Street, “Logic
and Limits,” p. 64. Radical economist Giovanni Arrighi’s concept of “workplace
bargaining power’ refers to the strategic capacity of some industrial workers to
disrupt and damage the flow of work and materials in expensive, subdivided,
continuous-flow, and inflexible industrial workplace facilities. Arrighi, “A Crisis of
Hegemony,” in Dynamics of Global Crisis, ed. Samir Amin et al. (New York,
1982), pp. 82-91. The especially perishable and expensive nature of the packers’
raw material added significantly to packinghouse workers’ direct workplace bar-
gaining power.

20. Alma Herbst, ““The Negro in the Slaughtering and Meatpacking Industry in
Chicago” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1928), pp. 127-129, 131-132; “Memo-
randum of June 17 Address Before the Interracial Committee of the Union League
Club,” 1926, Julius Rosenwald Papers, University of Chicago, Box 40, folder 2, pp.
2-3; Armour Magazine (April 1927): 5—6; Street, “Logic and Limits,” pp. 660-662.

21. Among many possible cites, see Chicago Commission on Race Relations,
The Negro in Chicago (Chicago, 1922), pp. 429; Herbst, The Negro, pp. 63-65,
127-147; Grossman, Land of Hope, p. 242; Street, “Working in the Yards,” pp.
316-343.

22. Street, “Logic and Limits”; William Tuttle, Race Riot, pp. 108-156;
Grossman, Land of Hope, chap. 7; Barrett, Work and Community, pp. 202-224;
Rick Halpern, “Race, Ethnicity, and Union in the Chicago Stockyards, 1917-1922,”
International Review of Social History, 37 (1992): 25-58; Street, “Working in the
Yards,” pp. 316-341, 535-540.

23. Barrett, Work and Community, pp. 205, 208-209, 212-213, 215. See also
Grossman, Land of Hope, pp. 232-234, 236 239; Halpern, “Race, Ethnicity, and
Union,” pp. 42-43.

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46 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

24. Street, “Logic and Limits,” pp. 669-672; Paul Street, ‘““Packinghouse Blues,”
Chicago History, 18 (Fall 1989): 68-85.

25. Defender, 7 July 1923, p. 3; Herbst, “The Negro,” pp. 127-129, 131-132;
Street, “Working in the Yards,” pp. 312—13, 296-300.

26. Thomas in Banks, First Person, p. 69; Herbst, The Negro, pp. xxi1—xxii1;
Fogel, Negro in the Meat Industry, pp. 49-51.

27. March Recollections, pp. 55-56; Anna Novack interview in Banks, First
Person, p. 64; Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, pp. 270-71; CIO News: Pack-
inghouse Workers’ Edition, 2 January 1939, p. 2; Drake and Cayton, Black Me-
tropolis, pp. 83-89; Kampfert, “A History,” 4, part 2, 3; Cayton and Mitchell, Black
Workers, pp. 270-71; Harold Gosnell, Negro Politicians and the Rise of Negro
Politics in Chicago (Chicago, 1935), pp. 325-341.

28. Preece, “What Goes On;” CIO News: Packinghouse Workers’ Edition, 2
January 1939; March Recollections, pp. 55-56; Swift CIO Flash, 26 June 1939;
Banks, First Person, pp. 64, 67-71; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 312-—
341; interview with Phillip Weightman by Roger Horowitz and Rick Halpern,
October 7-8, 1986, Washington D.C., United Packinghouse Workers of America
Oral History Project, State Historical Society of Wisconsin [hereafter “UPWAOHP”’],
tape 285, side 2; interview with Herbert March by Horowitz and Halpern, October
21, 1986, Madison, Wisconsin, UPWAOHP tape 298, side 1; Stella Nowicki, “Back
of the Yards,” in Rank and File: Personal Histories of Working-Class Organizers,
ed. Staughton and Alice Lynd (Princeton, N.J., 1981), pp. 83, 88; Hutton, “The
Negro Worker,” pp. 104-106; Theodore Purcell, The Worker Speaks His Mind on
Company and Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), pp. 57, 319, n.4; Horowitz, “The
Path Not Taken,” pp. 245-46, 257. The Swift’s superintendent is quoted in Lewis,
“Trade Union Policies,” p. 68.

29. Midwest Daily Record, 11 June 1938; CIO News: Packinghouse Workers
Edition, 5, 12 December 1938; Hutton, “The Negro Worker,” pp. 109-112; Preece,
“What Goes”; Weightman interview, UPWAOHP tape 286, side 2; Stephen Brier,
“Labor, Race, and Politics: A Black Worker’s Life,’ Labor History, 23 (1983):
416-421; Barbara Newell, Chicago and the Labor Movement (Urbana, Ill., 1961),
pp. 241-42; Horowitz, “The Path Not Taken,” pp. 242-243.

30. Midwest Daily Record, 25 November 1938. On Irish as blacks’ foremost
South Side enemies, see Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, p. 62; Barrett, Work
and Community, pp. 219-224.

31. Thomas, in Banks, First Person, pp. 68-69.

32. Preece, “What Goes”; Hutton, “The Negro Worker,” p. 107. For evidence
that this praise of interracialism in Back of the Yards is somewhat exaggerated, see
Halpern ““Black and White,’” p. 384.

33. Hutton, “The Negro Worker,” p. 104. For recollections consistent with
Hutton’s observation, see Weightman interview, UPWAOHP tape 287, side 2; March
interview, UPWAOHP tape 294, side 2; Kampfert, “A History,” vol. 3, p. 23.

34. Herbst, The Negro, pp. xxi, 70, 78-80, 168-169; Street, “Working in the
Yards,” pp. 309, 661. Former Swift militant Phillip Weightman uses the term “fra-
ternity” to describe Black-Polish shop-floor relations in the 1930s in Weightman
interview, UPWAOHP tape 285, side 2.

35. March interview, UPWAOHP tapes 294, side 2, 298, side 1; Cohen, Making
a New Deal, pp. 259-61; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 88-89, 353-
355.

36. Halpern, “‘Black and White,’” pp. 285—288; Halpern, Down on the Killing
Floor, pp. 107-112.

37. March interview, UPWAOHP tape 294, side 2; March ILHS tape; March

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Street 47

Recollections, pp. 1-40; author’s interview with Stella Nowicki, 1983; Special
House Committee on Un-American Activities, Executive Hearings, November 17,
1939, Chicago, Illinois (Washington D.C., 1940), pp. 342-390.

38. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, p. 313; Cohen, Making a New Deal, p.
337; March interview, UPWAOHP tape 294, side 1, 298, side 2; William Z. Foster,
“Your Questions Answered” (June, 1939), reproduced in Foster, American Trade
Unionism (New York, 1947), p. 286.

39. William Z. Foster, “The Organization of Negro Workers,” Daily Worker, 16
May 1929, reproduced in Foster, American Trade Unionism, p. 183; Street, “Logic
and Limits,” pp. 663-666; March interview, UPWAOHP tape 295, side 1; Nowicki,
“Back of the Yards,” pp. 74-76; author’s interview with Stella Nowicki, 1983;
Gosnell, Negro Politicians, pp. 323, 332; Sterling Spero and Abram Harris, The
Black Worker: the Negro and the Labor Movement (Port Washington, N.Y., 1966),
pp. 414429; Weightman interview, UPWAOHP tape 286, side 2. The concluding
quotation is from Weightman, a black worker at Swift’s who was unsuccessfully
recruited by the stockyards section of the CP during the late 1930s.

40. Koscilowski interview, ROLHC, 33; Cohen, Making a Deal, p. 335.

41. See the suggestive analysis in Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, p. 317.
For examples of such sudden, dramatic shifts, Kampfert, “A History,” vol. 3, pt. 2,
5—6; Hutton, “The Negro Worker,” p. 102; Weightman interview, UPWAOHP
tapes 284-285.

42. Phil Foner, Black Workers and Organized Labor, pp. 188-89; Drake and
Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 83-84; March Recollections, pp. 51-53; Kampfert,
“A History,” volume 3; Street, “Working in the Yards,” pp. 586-595, 598;
Koscilowski interview, ROLHC, 6,15; Cohen, Making a New Deal, pp. 242, 335.

43. Midwest Daily Record, 10 June 1939; Weightman interview, UPWOHP
tape 287, side 2; Hutton, “The Negro Worker, p. 104; Kampfert, ““A History,” vol.
3, p. 23.

44. March ILHS tape; oral history interviews with Weightman, Jesse Vaughn,
and March, UPWAOHP tapes 32-33, 295, 299-300, 284-88, 295; March Recollec-
tions, pp. 62, 96-97; author’s interview with Stella Nowicki; Midwest Daily Record,
15 February 1938, 2 March 1938, 9 March 1938, 11 June 1938, 14 July 1938, 16
July 1938, 14 October 1938, 27 October 1938, 30 October 1938, 1 November 1938,
26 November 1938, 29 November 1938, 23 June 1939, 28 August 1939; CIO News:
Packinghouse Edition, 14 November 1938, 9 January 1939, 23 June 1939; Street,
“Working in the Yards,” pp. 113-114, 537-540, 646-653, 664; Street, “Breaking
Up Old Hatreds,” pp. 73-76; Newell, Chicago and the Labor Movement, p. 167.

45. March ILHS tape; Nowicki, “Back of the Yards,” p. 80; interview with
Jesse Vaughn by Horowitz and Halpern, Chicago, Illinois, 1985, UPWAOHP tape
32. Brown and Vaughn quickly led their Amalgamated locals into the PWOC after
the formation of the CIO packinghouse union.

46. Weightman interview, UPWAOHP tapes 284-87; Weightman, “A History,”
4, part 2, 5-6; Paul Street, “The Swift Difference: Workers, Managers, Militants
and Welfare Capitalism in Chicago’s Meatpacking Industry, 1921-1942,” in
Stromquist and Bergman, Unionizing the “Jungles,”’ pp. 36-38.

47. Interview with Anna Novack by Betty Burke, 1939, in Banks, First Person,
p. 64; interview with Sophie Kosciolowski, ROLHC, p. 33; Hutton, “The Negro
Worker,” 92—103; Halpern and Horowitz, Meatpackers, p. 28; Scott, Occupational
Changes, passim; Richard Rowan, The Negro in the Steel Industry, 25—37.

48. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, p. 309.

49. Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: the World the Slaves Made (New
York, 1976), pp. 157, 232-279, 324; Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights,

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48 Journal of American Ethnic History / Fall 2000

pp. 116, 135-139; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, pp. 148-149; Mathilda Burton, “Ne-
gro Work Songs,” 1939, The Negro in Illinois Survey, Illinois Writers’ Project,
Works Progress Administration, Carter Woodson Branch of the Chicago Public
Library.

50. Street, “Working in the Yards,” pp. 633-42, 646-51, 669-71; Cohen, Mak-
ing a New Deal, pp. 339-349.

51. Timothy Smith, “Native Blacks and Foreign Whites: Varying Responses to
Educational Opportunities in America, 1880-1950,” Perspectives in American His-
tory, 6 (1972): 309-319; Ermest Talbot, Opportunities in School and Industry for
the Children of the Stockyards District (Chicago, 1916), pp. 8, 15-16, 23; John
Bodnar, “Immigration, Kinship, and the Rise of Working-Class Realism in Indus-
trial America,” Journal of Social History, 14 (1980): 45-65; Grossman, Land of
Hope, pp. 8, 17-18, 36, 52, 54, 62, 81, 90-93, 161, 175-76, 182, 249-52, 257, 259,
263; Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll, pp. 561-566; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropo-
lis, pp. 515-516; Theodore Purcell, The Worker Speaks His Mind on Company and
Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p. 31. For suggestive comparative data on el-
ementary and high school attendance and graduation rates among black workers
and residents of the white-ethnic Back of the Yards neighborhood during the 1930s,
see Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor, p. 278, n.45.

52. Halpern, Down on the Killing Floors, p. 278, n.45.

53. “Memorandum of June 17 Address Before the Interracial Committee of the
Union League Club,” 1926, Julius Rosenwald Papers, University of Chicago, Box
40, folder 2, pp. 2-3.

54. March ILHS tape; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 214-262, 515,
566 (see especially 239 and 515); Demsey Travis, An Autobiography of Black
Chicago (Chicago, 1981), pp. 85, 95-96; Demsey Travis, Autobiography of Black
Politics (Chicago, 1987), pp. 461, 481-82.

55. Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, pp. 515.

56. Dominic Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on
the South Side (Columbus,Ohio, 1991). Robert Slayton, Back of the Yards: the
Making of a Local Democracy (Chicago, 1986).

57. Preece, ‘““What Goes On.”

58. Many if not most senior Back-of-the-Yards Catholic pastors took a wary
perspective on the CIO, denouncing the PWOC as “atheistic” and “Communist-
dominated.” Long attached to fierce ethno-national rivalries for which Back-of-the-
Yards was notorious, some of these priests felt uncomfortable with the inter-ethnic
and biracial logic of the CIO. While they were countered by a more Americanized
and liberal cadre of second-generation New Immigrant and pro-CIO/pro-New Deal
assistant priests (who viewed their superiors as the “end of an era’’), only a well
publicized meeting between liberal Chicago Bishop Bernard Sheil and CIO Presi-
dent John L. Lewis in the fall of 1939 brought most of the Back-of-the-Yards’
influential Catholic churches to the CIO side in the stockyards. By that time, a
considerable number of black packinghouse workers/preachers had already joined
the CIO and likely begun spreading the CIO cause to their “flocks” (parishioners)
and others. March Recollections, pp. 69—70; Street, “Working in the Yards,” pp.
666—668; Slayton, Back of the Yards, pp. 196-205.

59. Slayton, Back of the Yards, pp. 21-25, 79, 97-98, 118-126, 134-138; Drake
and Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 381, 387-88, 611-653; Robert Sutherland, “An
Analysis of Negro Churches 1n Chicago” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1930).
pp. 4-5, 51-54, 71-72, 91-96; St. Clair Drake, Churches and Voluntary Associa-
tions in the Chicago Negro Community (Chicago, 1940), pp. 146-151, 298-306;

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Street 49

Alan Spear, Black Chicago: the Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago,
1967), p. 177; August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto (New
York, 1966), p. 265.

60. Jesse Vaughn interview, UPWAOHP tape 32.

61. Street, “Working in the Yards,” pp. 665-666. For suggestive ideas regarding
the relationship between working-class religious and trade-union activism in a dif-
ferent time and place, see E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working-Class
(New York, 1963), pp. 43, 353, 380, 391, 394, 422, 509, 672-73.

62. Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, pp. 658-723.

63. Ibid, pp. 400-412

64. Ibid, pp. 716-754.

65. Cayton and Drake, Black Metropolis, pp. 340-41, 566, 723. The quote is
from p. 723.

66. Kelley, “‘“We Are Not What We Seem,”” p. 79.

67. Among numerous possible cites, see David Montgomery, The Fall of the
House of Labor: the Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 2, 4; Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement
(New York, 1928), pp. 237-253.

68. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, pp. 390-396; Hutton, “The Negro
Worker,” p. 112.

69. Preece, ‘““What Goes On.”

70. Among many possible cites, see Thomas Gobel, “Becoming American: Eth-
nic Workers and the Rise of the CIO,” Labor History, 29 (1988): 173-198;

71. Cole, 1939, in Banks, First Person, pp. 67-68.

72. Among many possible cites, see Thompson, The Making of the English
Working-Class, passim; Wolfgang Abendroth, A Short History of the European
Working-Class (New York, 1972), pp. 9-68.

73. Some recent scholarship has acknowledged the importance of this duality in
explaining black participation in CIO unions. See Honey, Southern Labor and
Black Civil Rights, pp. 136-138; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, p. 172; Halper, “Orga-
nized Labor, Black Workers,” p. 71.

74. Hutton, “The Negro Worker,” p. 113; March ILHS tape; Preece, “What
Goes On.”

75. Montgomery, “To Study the People: the American Working Class,” Labor
History, 21 (Fall 1980): 510.

76. Kampfert, “A History,” volume 3, part 2, 5; Armour: A Monthly Magazine
(October 1937): 18-19, (February 1938): 8, 20.

77. Horowitz and Halpern, Meatpackers, pp. 4446.

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